Thierry Henry, Marquez, Beckham top list of highest earners in MLS League

To an overseas player in Major League Soccer, having your salary made public knowledge seems slightly strange to say the least. Remember the furore when John Arne Riise’s wage slip was found in a Liverpool street in 2007? Well, twice a year the MLS Players Union releases the wage figures of every player in the league, from the newest academy recruit to Thierry Henry. Such a degree of openness is almost impossible to comprehend within a European frame

The latest list reaffirms what most people knew or suspected – the teams in the biggest media markets are the biggest spenders. New York Red Bulls have three out of four of the highest-paid players in the league in Thierry Henry (No1), Raphael Marquez (No2) and Tim Cahill (No4), and by far the biggest salary outlay of any team (almost $16.75m when guaranteed wages are taken into account).

The Los Angeles Galaxy pay out just over $12.7m in guaranteed wages, with David Beckham (No3) heading a golden trio that also includes Robbie Keane (No5) and Landon Donovan (No7). At least those two sides have competitive teams for the money – Toronto FC may be third place in the spending tables ($7.5m guaranteed), but they are dead last in the Eastern Conference while the side with the second-lowest payroll ($3.25m), Sporting Kansas City, are at the top, challenging for the Supporters Shield – hoping to climb above San Jose Earthquakes ($3.2m).

From the outside these figures are always a cause for speculation, if not outright entertainment, with media, fans and bloggers adding columns of their own to the base statistics (SB Nation), to rate performance value per dollar (Fox), often in scathing terms, and with a critical eye on high-priced foreign imports who fail to produce to a degree considered proportionate to younger American team-mates.

As Bob Foose, executive director of the MLS Players Union, explained: “It’s something we’ve always done. It’s not to our bargaining advantage for it to be kept secret. If anything the owners might want it to be kept secret… Occasionally it can make a player from another country or league uncomfortable, and I can see it could be embarrassing – but we explain our reasons to them and it has actually been put to the vote by players before, and they’ve backed it so we’ll continue to do it if we think it helps us.”

Foose was speaking in Washington DC, where 180 delegates from players’ unions around the world gathered for the FIFpro general assembly – coinciding in the calendar with the slightly more high-profile Leaders in Football conference in London, featuring the great and good of the global soccer industry.

FIFPro is the world players’ union. Accordingly, the conversation revolved around collective bargaining agreements, invasive and ineffective doping monitoring, player healthcare and pensions, intimidation of players in inadequately regulated territories and numerous other unglamorous but vital components of the daily administration and culture of the game.

The London conference, held at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge home, featured contributions from the MLS commissioner Don Garber, Portland Timbers owner Merritt Paulson and Seattle Sounders owner Adrian Hanauer, as well as league officials and experienced general managers and CEOs such as Philadelphia’s Nick Sakiewicz. Subjects included the MLS strategy to become a top league by 2022, the ever-vexed subject of the MLS calendar being out of synch with Fifa, and the sport’s burgeoning profile in the USA.
Bob Foose. Photo: Stéphane St-Raymond/FIFPro
The players’ event was facilitated by the MLS Players Union – a major coup for Foose. Ironically, even in representing players from such a young league, Foose and his team were relative veterans at the assembly, compared to delegates and observers from countries such as the Czech Republic – whose union, chaired by the ex-Manchester United player Karel Poborsky, was ratified by FIFPro at this year’s event.

The MLS Players Union found itself entering the conference with its profile – generally modest outside the saber-rattling periods leading up to collective bargaining agreements (the last MLS CBA was ratified in March 2010) – at one of its periodic highs, thanks to last week’s publication of the latest round of player salary figures.

Whatever the embarrassment felt in the locker room, the figures certainly cause a certain amount of embarrassment for the executives, as they pursue their goals of market share in their own country, let alone international credibility, with this aspect of their inner workings very much on public display.

The counter-argument from the players is that this transparency, within the arcane system of salary caps, designated players and the daddy of all esoterica, allocation money, is a useful tool in benchmarking their contribution and ensuring their fair share of proceeds as the MLS business grows. Crudely put, to attract the media attention and TV deals it needs for that growth, MLS has to produce the figures that confirm it’s on track. At which point the MLS Players Union can point to the salary figures to show the players enjoy a more or less equitable share of that pie at any given moment. The stats consistently make clear the very modest salaries of many of the players working in MLS – and in doing so perhaps help underpin the union mandate.

There is also an argument that the publication of the salaries, while potentially embarrassing for underperforming high earners and the people who pay them, can also be leveraged the other way. Mauro Rosales at Seattle had a breakout season in 2011 on a league minimum wage of $42K. He is back in 2012 as a designated player, albeit one whose basic wage, while much improved to a guaranteed $225,000, does not compare to other players in the league carrying the DP tag (his salary is significantly supplemented by a series of add-ons that keep the Sounders under the cap and Rosales happy not to have permanently undervalued himself with a poor year at the cut rate).

Chris Wondolowski can also rely on a fair amount of local public opinion being behind him when he states his case that he should be a $1m-per-annum designated player next year, instead of earning the $300,000 that has bought San Jose 25-goals-and-counting this season. Wondolowski can also point to the very publicly documented years he spent as a development player for much less money and make a very reasonable case that in the limited window he has to make money for himself and his family, he is probably entering the last year to make such a deal for himself.

But as the FIFPro delegates met in Washington to represent organized labor within the global game, they were at pains to emphasize that the point is not the more eye-catching individual salaries on offer – whether in the upper echelons of the English or Spanish leagues, or the comparatively modest outlays in the American game – but the collective bargaining power of players negotiating en masse, as the MLS Players Union did in 2004 (full agreement here) and 2010 to secure the collective bargaining agreements that secured healthcare and pension rights, and certain concessions on player movement.

Also at the FIFPro conference, DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, and Michael Weiner, his MLB equivalent, had outlined their respective struggles towards their sports’ CBAs in recent years. (Don Fehr, their NHL counterpart, was originally scheduled to appear but, ironically, he has a lockout to contend with.)

The global delegates and observers, assembled from countries as diverse as Malta, Indonesia and Palestine, all had horror stories about organizing for the vast majority of players for whom multi-million dollar salaries are a pipe dream, but even they seemed to balk at some of the descriptions of the routine practices permitted under American labor law, such as the idea of the lockout as a standard “technique” of owners in the negotiating process.

For Smith and the NFLPA the memories were recent and bruising. For MLB’s Weiner, the last decade’s CBA negotiations have been a relatively straightforward process fueled by meticulous preparation of his members, starting two years out from negotiations, the significant fact that no salary cap exists in the league, and of course the bruising folk memory of the 232 day stoppage of 1994-95, which fuels a current wary respect between owners and players.

When I spoke last month to Todd Durbin, the MLS vice-president who has negotiated virtually every contract in MLS, he seemed to share such wary respect for his union counterparts, despite the memory of what had been a draining and emotional battle for all parties in working towards the last CBA, when the threat of a work stoppage was only narrowly averted.

“When you’re dealing with labor issues you’re dealing with peoples’ lives,” he said. “It’s not like a commercial transaction, you’re talking about creating an environment that everybody has to live in after the fact. So the goal is not to win, because you have to live with whatever it is you’ve built afterwards. So the goal is not for us to win, it’s not for them to win, it’s to build an environment that gives us the best chance to make the business successful. We’re all sort of growing up together, and to [the players’] credit… they’re smart and they’re tough, but they have a genuine interest in building the business. And the players do as well, and they deserve a lot of credit.”

Durbin’s is a much more sanguine take than some governing-body attitudes that were described at the FIFPro assembly – the power plays and “choke out” moves, as one speaker put it. Of course, the MLS model is structured on a sense of shared enterprise that can, eventually, be successfully appealed to in player/management negotiations, but that doesn’t mean that the size and rights to that share are not a matter for continuous contestation, some of it extremely heated.

With the next MLS CBA due to be negotiated in 2014, this period of mutual respect could yet come to look like a golden age in labor relations. Last week though, the players and the owners were in their huddles, separated by the Atlantic.

 

 

 

 

 

Source: UK Guardian